Typefaces and Font Types: A Brief Primer

Typefaces comprise an aspect of digital and printed media that has been carefully refined over the many years such media has been allowed to proliferate. The lettering used on everything from legal documentation to online entertainment has been standardized to take into account the respective needs of different demographics. This is important because some subtle changes to the way a font appears can render text illegible to persons with visual or cognitive impairments. Countless hundreds of fonts are available for download and installation, and they are often categorized and judged based on whether or not they are "sans-serif" fonts that do not have "foot"-like extensions on their bottom edges.

Since there is always an ongoing effort to create fonts that do not already effectively exist, there can be some appeal in a program that lets a user easily craft a typeface within various understandable parameters. A website named Universal Sans offers a fairly flexible means of letting the user adjust components of a base sans-serif typeface without involving manual artistic mouse movements like what image-creation programs like PhotoShop and Illustrator are centered around. Within a condensed set of the site's tools that the site labels "basic," one can move simple sliders to adjust the "weight" of the lettering to make it bold and thick by default, the "roundness" of various letters' ovaloid components, and the angle of letters' "terminals." The "advanced" suite of functions available alongside this amounts to a similar set of tools that allow for a more numerically precise result that is otherwise categorically the same as what the basic tools can produce.

However, the website does not allow the user to freely export the font and download it for unlimited use within one's personal projects. Like all mainstream typefaces, what can be exported from this program must have a license assigned to it for copyright-related legal reasons. The website requires the user to craft a license based on various parameters and purchase it if they intend to do more with their creation than download it as a trial version free of charge. For more information click here https://universalsans.com/.